UK Viewing – You Can Ask Me Anything

Ask Rhod Gilbert

Regular readers of this blog will already be aware of  Rhod Gilbert as the subject of  one of the recent Comedians You Should Know articles, and as a stand-up he is definitely among my favourites. I had the good fortune of seeing his The Cat Who Looked Like Nicholas Lyndhurt tour in person last year and I absolutely cannot fault him for being an incredibly funny live performer.

But aside from being a stand-up, the face of Welsh Tourism and a regular presenter on Radio Wales, he is also just concluding the first series of his new TV program, Ask Rhod Gilbert.

I’m going to come out and say straight off, the show is just a little bit odd. It’s not a bad thing, it just takes a tiny bit of getting used to. The format is essentially part quiz, part text answering service, while simultaneously trying to be a comedy discussion forum. Rhod acts as the chairman while the panel of four guests are posed bizarre and sometimes un-answerable questions from a variety of sources. Definitive answers, random trivia and related Youtube clips are provided by the week’s celebrity authenticator, armed only with a laptop and access to Google (and presumably a production team doing the actual research.)

The panel is made up of two visiting guests, usually comedians or minor UK celebrities, as well as two regulars. One is Rhod’s flatmate, Lloyd (comedian Lloyd Langford) and the other is “Unreasonably Tall Human” Greg Davies (part of the comedy troupe We Are Klang) and as a group they attempt to answer such pressing questions as “Which is the most dangerous part of the human body?” or “Can dogs blow?” This happens usually while bickering and inciting Rhod into one of his long but fun rants.

Weighing Jack Whiteheall's Head

When the combination of panel guests and celebrity authenticator is a good one, the show can be incredibly funny. Worthy of particular mention is David Tennant’s stint in the authentication chair and his spectacular argument with Rhod about cockerels, but the success of each show is so incredibly dependant on the chemistry of the people taking part that when the mix isn’t working it sadly has the potential to fall just a bit too much into banality.

A lot of the questions themselves are user-submitted. Viewers and audience-members are encouraged to tweet their queries to the show, and a fair few of them are rhetorical which mostly provides Rhod with the opportunity to answer them himself with his frequently sarcastic asides. The last part of the show is also rounded out by one of the visiting panellists posing a question to be answered by Greg and Lloyd in the form of a pre-planned sketch. It’s a section which I can really only describe as the “Greg Takes Advantage Of Lloyd” moment. The success of these bits varies enormously. The “Lloydy GaGa” bread dress I thought was genuinely pretty funny, but others have come across primarily as an excuse to just throw things at Lloyd or glue stuff to him, all of which he takes with the long-suffering stoicism that befits his slightly slow and un-emotive stage persona. It’s not overtly cruel, it’s just not always especially clever either and I think that’s a fault that can, at times, be levelled at the show as a whole.

The format has potential, parts of it are honestly very entertaining, but it can have a tendency to feel forced. It’s at its best when it descends into barely-leashed chaos and the people taking part are quick and clever enough to take advantage of that. As such it reminds me a great deal of another personality-driven panel show, Would I Lie To You? That took until its second series (and a change of host in their case) to find its feet and get a good balance between content and chaos.

Ask Rhod Gilbert is still trying to find that tonal balance. It hasn’t quite nailed its ideal style of guest yet. Too many comedians and you have too many egos trying to talk at once, too many minor celebrities and they don’t have enough to contribute to keep things going. If it is recommissioned for a second series (and I hope it is) I would not be especially surprised if they tweaked the setup a little to try and iron out that sense of awkwardness. They could also do with more questions that weren’t quite so insanely obvious.

I’m going to say that while I enjoy the show on the most part, it’s going to have to work a little harder to make it into the lauded realms of classic panel show formats. That said however, if you can find it you really do need to track down episode 5. Rhod and David Tennant winding each other up into a tantrum of rooster-related fury is a thing of utter beauty, and if the rest of the series was consistently even half as good as that one moment it would make its way substantially higher up my list of must-watch TV.

Links

• BBC Program Page
• To tweet a question to the show us the #AskRhod tag